When Carl Bergman isn't rooting for the Washington Nationals or searching for a Steeler bar, he’s Managing Partner of EHRSelector.com, a free service for matching users and EHRs. For the last dozen years, he’s concentrated on EHR consulting and writing. He spent the 80s and 90s as an itinerant project manger doing his small part for the dot com bubble. Prior to that, Bergman served a ten year stretch in the District of Columbia government as a policy and fiscal analyst.

Sickle cell anemia (SCA) is a genetic, red blood cell condition, which damages cell walls impeding their passage through capillaries. Episodic, it is often extremely painful. It can damage organs, cause infections, strokes or joint problems. These episodes or SCA crises can be prompted by any number of environmental or personal factors.

In the US, African Americans are most commonly susceptible to SCA, but other groups can have it as well. SCA presents a variety of management problems in the best of circumstances. As is often the case, management is made even more difficult when the patient is a child. That’s what Children’s Health of Dallas, Texas, one of the nation’s oldest and largest pediatric treatment facilities faced two years ago. Children’s Health, sixty five percent of whose patients are on Medicaid, operates a large, intensive SCA management program as the anchor institution of the NIH funded Southwestern Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center.

Children’s Health problem wasn’t with its inpatient care or with its outpatient clinics. Rather, it was keeping a child’s parents and doctors up to date on developments. Along with the SCA clinical staff, Children’s Chief Information Officer, Pamela Arora, and Information Management and Exchange Director, Katherine Lusk, tackled the problem. They came up with a solution using all off the shelf technology.

Their solution? Provide each child’s caregiver with a free Verizon smartphone. Each night, they extracted the child’s information from EPIC and sent it to Microsoft’s free, vendor-neutral HealthVault PHR. This gave the child’s doctor and parents an easy ability to stay current with the child’s treatment. Notably, Children’s was able to put the solution together quickly with minimal staff and without extensive development.

Children’s SCA project points out the value of these system development factors:

Clear, understood goal

Precise understanding of users and their needs

Small focused team

Searching for off the shelf solutions

Staying focused and preventing scope creep

Each of these proved critical to Children’s success. Not every project lends itself to this approach, but Children’s experience is worth keeping in mind as a useful and repeatable model of meeting an immediate need with a simple, direct approach.
Note: I first heard of Children’s project at John’s Atlanta conference. ONC’s Peter Ashkenaz mentioned it as a notable project that had not gained media attention. I owe him a thanks for pointing me to Katherine Lusk.